Python XML Parsing [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can use xml.etree.ElementTree which is included with Python. There is an included companion C-implemented (i.e. much faster) xml.etree.cElementTree. lxml.etree offers a superset of the functionality but it's not needed for what you want to do.

The code provided by @Acorn works identically for me (Python 2.7, Windows 7) with each of the following imports:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
import xml.etree.cElementTree as et
import lxml.etree as et
...
tree = et.fromstring(xmltext)
...

What OS are you using and what installation problems have you had with lxml?

Answer 2

import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
import csv

xmltext = """
<dicts>
    <key>1375</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Key 1</key><integer>1375</integer>
        <key>Key 2</key><string>Some String</string>
        <key>Key 3</key><string>Another string</string>
        <key>Key 4</key><string>Yet another string</string>
        <key>Key 5</key><string>Strings anyone?</string>
    </dict>
</dicts>
"""

f = open('output.txt', 'w')

writer = csv.writer(f, quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC)

tree = et.fromstring(xmltext)

# iterate over the dict elements
for dict_el in tree.iterfind('dict'):
    data = []
    # get the text contents of each non-key element
    for el in dict_el:
        if el.tag == 'string':
            data.append(el.text)
        # if it's an integer element convert to int so csv wont quote it
        elif el.tag == 'integer':
            data.append(int(el.text))
    writer.writerow(data)